RUTHFULLY YOURS

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour appeared tone deaf to the public outcry over her “news analysis” involving a mother and her two young daughters left for dead by three Palestinian terrorists in Northern Samaria.

She used the blatantly false term “shootout” to describe the cold-blooded murder of Lucy Dee and her two daughters, Maia, 20 and Rina, 15, as if suggesting an exchange of gunfire had taken place at the time the terrorists sprayed bullets into the Dee family vehicle. The Dee family was unarmed and en route to a holiday at the seaside.

Amanpour’s fanciful imagination at painting a “moral equivalency” between the two groups was not lost on Rabbi Leo Dee, husband and father to the victims. He astutely described the reportage as representing a new age of “terror journalism.”

“Christiane’s false reporting caused my family unimaginable pain and suffering at a time when we could least bear it,” Rabbi Dee said in the Jerusalem Post. “This type of terror journalism perpetuates the conflict in the Middle East… The real cycle of violence is a comment like this followed by a terrorist atrocity and them more of the same.”

This sort of impassioned commentary is something Amanpour has become accustomed to hearing as a virulently anti-Israel commentator. But she’s less accustomed to looking down the barrel of a $1.3 billion lawsuit proposed by a grieving family member against her personally and her news organization, CNN. Rabbi Dee is consulting with legal experts and has made his intention clear of expressing his concerns to David Zaslav, CEO of CNN. He has requested a meeting with Zaslav.

The rabbi’s attempt to right a wrong appears to have motivated Amanpour to emerge from behind her wall of silence and issue an apology. “I referred to the murders of an Israeli family: Lucy, Maia and Rina Dee, the wife and daughter of Rabbi Leo Dee. I misspoke and said they were killed in a ‘shootout’ instead of a shooting,” Amanpour offered. “I have written to Rabbi Leo Dee to apologize and make sure the he knows that we apologize for any further pain that may have caused him.”

Rabbi Dee publicly accepted Amanpour’s apology, but his grander vision of holding CNN accountable goes beyond acknowledging a two-paragraph apology. He wants to change the network’s “cycle of false reporting:” His intention is to hold the global network accountable for news reporting that just doesn’t obfuscate the truth, but repackages the facts to the extent that viewers fail to learn the most essential truths.

In this case, CNN viewers would never know from Amanpour and her Israel-bashing colleagues, that the Dee family was murdered at close range, the matriarch had donated her organs for the benefit of others, and among the recipients would be an Arab citizen, as well as Rabbi Dee expressing his sentiment that the “vast majority of Palestinians are good people.”

None of this fit Amanpour’s corrupt narrative.

It is not Rabbi Dee’s intent to vilify Amanpour, but rather place a spotlight on the network that has the power to mold the thinking of millions of viewers on the explosive issue of Israel and the Palestinians.

Amanpour has long enjoyed espousing falsehoods about Israel and not being held accountable for her reckless reporting. She had the luxury of taking refuge behind a wall of silence at a network which simply filed away the barrage of viewer protests expressed in texts, emails, phones calls, and social media posts.

That was standard operating procedure for Amanpour and her employer in many cases. In fact, Amanpour’s apology read more like a mix-up over semantics where she “misspoke” referring to the murder of a family as a “shootout” when she should have identified it as a “shooting.”

Rabbi Dee contends there is more to the false narrative than mistaken semantics, and Amanpour’s apology speaks volumes about her inability to grasp the meaning of fair and accurate reporting.